Hi Judy, does your external bluetooth adapter also give you keyboard functionality in BIOS? Thanks.

I have been fighting this same battle.

My scenario is slightly different in that after the win7 64 installation my keyboard worked, even though the bluetooth didn't show up in the device manager (or any where else). Baffling. 

The keyboard did, however, have performance issues as compared to XP. It would go to sleep after only of few minutes of inactivity and take several seconds of track pad use or several key strokes to become active again. It also did have intermittent periods where it would fail to connect w/o the cold boot pairing technique in the manual. This got gradually worse after a few months and eventually would inexplicably just fail to connect at all for a week or more at a time.

I finally ordered a new keyboard battery and ran into a new problem. 

It had difficulty pairing and then after a few hours it failed to connect at all. I tried all of the  usual methods and a few new ones including a failed attempt at a miss matched OS firmware update.

After the aborted firmware update something new happened. I got a bluetooth icon in the systray and Bluetooth Radios bullet in the device manager.

I was still getting just blinking lights and no pairing on the  computer and on keyboard.

But after playing around with the systray Icon I discovered that a double click would open a Bluetooth Devices window and that if I had the blinking light on the keyboard it would show up in the window.  A right click on the keyboard Icon yielded an old fashioned software pairing option with a code to type on the keyboard.

It worked the first time. It's held the connection through several reboots and a few hours of use now.  I am very pleased.

I am still planning on getting one of the USB adapters as a back up, but so far so good.

Hi Crainphoto! Thanks for the story. When you wrote that in the beginning your keyboard worked - does it mean that it was also functioning before OS had loaded - for example in BIOS? And - does it work in BIOS / before OS is loaded now?

Hi Crainphoto, thanks for the reply. The strange thing is that when I bought this Dell it had Vista on it, and the keyboard did definitely work in the BIOS - I can remember this quite well. And then, even without OS change, this functionality just disappeared somehow. After that I could find no way to restore it - no OS reinstall, no OS change (to XP, to Win7), and no toying with drivers in any combinations could help. However the blue Bluetooth tray icon always worked fine, so communicating with the keyboard inside an OS have never been a problem. Well, this Dell seems to be full of mysteries - I wonder if its creators, Dell engineers, know the answer, for when I attacked them with questions they failed to help ;-)

Dont Knowler,

No it doesn't work in the BIOS now and I don[t think it did  before either. But definitely did in XP.

Not sure why an OS change would effect the BIOS functionality, but it does.